Design Researcher, Geospatial & Utility Operations
About the role
Gridware is hiring its first dedicated design research role to build the research infrastructure that supports cross-functional product decision-making. The role focuses on how utility customers move from signal to evidence to decision to action and how to externalize that reasoning inside the product. The candidate will work closely with product managers and a product designer across multiple lanes in a hybrid, San Francisco-based setting.
Responsibilities
- Build decision-centered customer profiles.
- Map service design across the utility operating model.
- Lead GIS and data-rich workflow research.
- Make system reasoning legible by defining what to externalize (source provenance, data freshness, confidence and uncertainty, risk drivers, recommended action, and consequence of inaction).
- Study trust in automation and AI-assisted decisions.
- Build an evidence architecture to connect research outputs across roadmap cycles.
- Bring research into product planning with product managers.
- Establish a shared vocabulary for Gridware's users.
- Facilitate cross-functional research and alignment through workshops.
Qualifications
- Research rigor with systems and decision-mapping thinking (qualitative methods: interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, diary studies, workflow observation).
- Experience with expert users and technical domains.
- High-stakes operational context fluency.
- Decision and service design literacy (service blueprint, journey maps, multi-stakeholder workshops).
- Infrastructure mindset to create research practices and repositories.
Skills
Benefits
- Health, Dental & Vision (Gold and Platinum with some providers plans fully covered)
- Paid parental leave
- Alternating day off (every other Monday)
- Off the Grid — two weeks per year paid break
- Commuter allowance
- Company-paid training
About Gridware
Protecting the grid today, preparing the grid for tomorrow
Gridware exists to enhance and protect the mother of all networks: the electrical grid. The grid touches everyone and makes our modern economy possible. But it’s also fragile. When the grid is compromised, everything grinds to a halt, and the consequences can be dire: wildfires burn, land is destroyed, property is damaged, progress stops, and lives are lost. Our team builds smart sensors that help utility companies to immediately detect, find, and fix outages and take steps to prevent new outages, and other related disasters, from happening at all. The need for power will only increase. We protect the grid of today while we build the grid of tomorrow. Gridware is privately held and backed by the best climate-tech and Silicon Valley investors. We are headquartered in the Bay Area in northern California.
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